EDUCATION: A contrarian’s point of view

It always amazes me when people whine about the cost and relative ineffectiveness of public education in America. Our education is not as effective as it might be, not because it we spend too little on it, but because we spend too much on education.

I was watching a news report the other night on the diminishing Christian Church in Britain. Attendance has fallen off by more than 50% and many church buildings have had to be closed and sold. Toward the end of the report one of the Christian clergy was saying that the reason why these churches were failing was that they had made religion “inconvenient”. His example was that on Holy Days congregants were expected to attend services after work which he felt was entirely too much to ask. The report ended with a shot of a construction site that is supposed to be the start of the largest mosque in Europe. Why? Because the Moslem religion is the fastest growing religion in Britain. And of course we all know how liberal and easy going that is. People appreciate what they have to work for.

When the British forbade the Scotts to become educated, thousands of Scottish boys and girls would slip out of their homes and attend “school” at night under the hedgerows. They would learn math, and science, and (Scottish) history. People appreciate what they have to work for.

When our own slaves from Africa were forbidden to learn to read or write – teaching and learning still went on, even when the penalty might have been death. People appreciate what they have to work for.

My father, who really did go to school in a one room school could read and write in Latin and had read some of the classics in Latin. He never finished high school but dropped out and went to work on the cargo ships on the Great Lakes.My mother was the 11th of 12 children, attended high school in a small farming community, Watseka. Ill. Her father owned the local saloon and did a little farming. She attended 2 years of college and read and wrote both Latin and French.

The point is that it does not take a multimillion dollar school to turn out well educated people. It does take a desire to learn. Abraham Lincoln and Thomas A. Edison are proofs of that. Desire is enhanced by scarcity or unattainability. So if, as a society, we want more of our children to go to school and to learn something while they are there, we should make schools much harder to get into and much harder to pass.